Site Has Dropped from Google - Help!!!

[Dannybance]

We had a site that was used for our business and had a reasonable Google presence. We then altered our business and our website to mirror this. We used a "Best Practice" SEO company, created IBL at a natural pace and done nothing I can see to offend google, but our site has practically dropped out of their listings and has been so for 5 months. When we were page 1-2 we are now not in the first 600 and thats when we stopped looking.

Im aware of the Sandbox and have used several tools to see if we are effected but all show inconclusive contradictory advice.

The ONLY possibility I can think of is that as we had over 300 old pages listed accross the major search engines, we decided to setup a 404 error redirect
on a server wide basis, which redirected to the home page. So as not to lose existing traffic. Therefore not issuing a 404 header.

We thought that the Search engines would eventually drop these old pages out when they realised they were all pointing to the same page.

However 6 months on the old pages remain listed and all the new pages dont seem to appear anywhere in the indexes. Could we be getting hit by a duplicate content filter?

Today we have implemented a custom 404 page which issues the 404 header. So we are expecting the old pages to drop out now, however is it possible that we could get sandboxed as a new launch site with so many page changes. Are there any better ways to get the old pages dropped from the indexes without getting penalised. The old pages do not all map to a new page and where they do the page content is different.

Is there anyone who can take a look or offer advice as to something we are doing to offend or bad practice and how we can regain placements, or even give a definitive answer on our sandbox status?

I would really appreciate any help anyone can offer our site is www.propertyshowrooms.com.

Kind Regards

Steve

[DaveN]

IMO..

actually let me ask a question first :)

The links on the bottom of each page are they to help the user or to help a search engine spider..

A very common practice for SE spammers (not calling you that) is to generator many pages of content rich with a single keyword then add many keywords links on the footer of each page..

if Google decided that after researching link placement, that 99% of all sites that have a high % of links at the base of each page are spamming us .. then you could be the 1% that isn't but get caught in a new filter..

NOTE : this is only a guess and not FACT !

DaveN

[Dannybance]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for taking the time to take a look. The links at the bottom are designed to offer quick ref links to various info on the site. We were careful to ensure that they are unique content. One of the most successful sites is the following:

<snip>

These guys dont seem to have been penalised. Its common practice to use this especially in the Spanish Property arena which is highly competitive. But if you think this could be a problem then we may have to look at removing these.

Any other info or advice you can throw on the subject?

Thanks Again

Steve

[glengara]

While G doesn't seem to have indexed your .asp pages, it has your cfm ones, and fairly interesting they are too.

To a jaundiced eye, the .cfm ones could be deemed internal link spam, while the .cfm?ID=* pages seem to bring you to another site altogether, villadelsol.co.uk.

These pages are only viewable in the G cache, if anyone cares to give another opinion....

[Dannybance]

Hi, Yeah I have noticed that although google does spider some .asp pages there are still some .cfm pages that are indexed and with some strange stuff. .CFM hasnt been used for around 1.5 years on this site although as i mentioned at the beggining i think that part of the issue may be that there was a 404 redirect set up so the indexed .cfm pages were redirecting to the new home page and thus keeping them from dropping out. Anyway to get rid of this quickly does anyone know? Or any other ideas whats preventing the new .asp pages from being liked.